We posted recently about the growing volume of bot-generated posts in social in general and on Twitter in particular. Good piece on slate about this “artificial stupidity”. It’s relatively harmless to the average jane/joe but for businesses who are paying for social listening tools it’s a real problem as an increasing quantity of what they interpret as relevant volume is utter bullshit.

The vapidness of the results from social listening tools are a dirty little secret of the industry, the equivalent of the fake clicks that are a big part of online media, but eventually this issue puts at risk social listening as a research tool. Hopefully Twitter fixes things before it gets damaged beyond repair.

Riding the J Church line to work today. Noticed five people reading real live books and three people reading on tablets. Not bad, not bad. Books had a good showing. Gender division among the readers was distinct however. The only readers of printed books were women. Tablets were all guys.

Not shocking for sure. Women took over book buying years ago but holy crap. Dump any marketing dollars for men if you’re a bookstore focusing on print. None of the printed books were library books though. That’s a big shift from 18 months ago when the local libraries were doing gangbusters due to recession. At least on this train line some optimism and buying happening.

More telling though were the numbers doing email on phones. It was probably 45 people doing email versus 8 reading books. Every single phone was an iphone. It was only 8:00 and historically that kind of email frenzy doesn’t happen until closer to 9:00.

Only one outlier amidst all of this. A lone guy pretending to read some kind of poetry-slam journal. Seriously, you might as well pull out a guitar and start playing some Donovan. That rap is not going to work and probably never did. Don’t think the modern day equivalent, the tablet, is going to get much play either.